Apple News & Updates : Two Guys And A Podcast

As I mentioned in Apple's Missed Opportunities, Part 1, I have had a few weeks now to work with Apple's OS X Mountain Lion. While people have written what they like or dislike about the new operating system, I tend to look at it from a business standpoint and what would make Apple more competitive in the small business space.

What Apple encouraged us to do with OS X Snow Leopard (10.6), it has eliminated only two years later with OS X Mountain Lion (10.8). It's sad, because RSS / Atom feeds are a great way to keep current on news and bloggers that interest you. One could argue no two RSS feed compilations are identical. Like DNA everyone has their own unique set. What is so frustrating is that the last thing I want to do is to download yet another app to manage RSS feeds. There is Mail, Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds... all which on the desktop used to be accessible using two apps: Safari or Mail. Now, we're forced to add a third to the mix. This is starting to get crazy. Go here for this, go here for that, and now use this other app for RSS feeds. What's more, at the same time Apple eliminated both Safari and Mail being able to manage RSS feeds. In their place Apple gave us Notification Center.

And here's where Apple missed the boat. What if Apple has just moved RSS feeds from Mail and Safari into Notification Center? I mean isn't that the idea of Notification Center? To notify us of incoming mail, remind us about appointments or a software update. Why not make this even more useful by letting us add RSS feeds to the mix? How about following someone on Twitter or Facebook? It is easy to see how quickly this simple Mountain Lion feature could become really, really powerful.

Craig Federighi (AKA Mr. Hair), are you listening? Notification Center could easily handle almost any and every kind of incoming notification on the Mac. If you do, and you make it easy to use and yet easy to define what types of messages I want to see and when, wow, you will truly have made the killer app that will push your OS another 5 years ahead of the competition. Plus, it is a feature that is very likely to become something people can't live without!